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Our View: The responses: 'enraged'

That was the opening sentence to last week’s editorial on this page. And touche, several readers made the same statement about about us. We enraged them, really enraged them.

Check out the letters to the editor.

Those are the ones readers signed.

H. Murray Blueglass, president of the Longboat Key Democratic Club, empatically let us know his organization will no longer purchase advertising space in the Longboat Observer. And as you read the letters, you’ll see that others thought of our comments as “vile,” “hate filled,” “horrific,” “vitriolic” and “disgusting.”

One letter writer called the editorial “hateful claptrap.” Another said the editorial “borders on treason” and noted that he is going to recommend to everyone he knows to boycott our newspapers and keep them from being distributed to Sarasota’s condominiums. Another said he would be calling the Secret Service to report the final line of the editorial — the reference to “a call to arms.”

The reaction is understandable. We’ve been in their shoes and know how they feel.

We’re not hateful. It’s not personal. Barack Obama is like most of us: He’s a husband and father and tries to do what he believes is right and just.

But there’s a deep gulf between his “right and just” and ours. It’s not hate. Call our opposition “passion.” We’re passionately opposed to his vision for the United States — an ever-expanding role for the state that punishes American exceptionalism so the state can pick winners and decide how to make everyone more equal.

And mea culpa. In hindsight, our reference to “a call to arms” was the wrong choice of words. They were meant to be metaphoric. When they were written, the Aurora, Colo., tragedy had not occurred. That event made that comment all the more incendiary. It was a metaphor to urge those offended by Obama’s “you didn’t build that” to rally for his defeat in the November elections.

Those remarks were the once-and-for-all evidence that Obama’s core being rejects what Hoover Institution senior fellow John B. Taylor calls “the first principles of economic freedom upon which the country was founded.” At the risk of offending Obama supporters even more, his words and actions confirm: He’s a collectivist.

And that is a rejection of the soul of the United States. As Hoover’s Taylor writes in his new book, “First Principles: Five Keys to Restoring America’s Prosperity”:

“At its most basic level, economic freedom means that families, individuals and entrepreneurs are free to decide what to produce, what to consume, what to buy and sell and how to help others. The American vision was that those decisions would be made within a predictable government policy framework based on the rule of law with strong incentives derived from the market system and with a clearly limited role for government.”

But ever since his election in 2008, Obama’s goal has been to expand the role of government in your life and shrink the “free” market.

This is anathema to our nation’s economic core. As Taylor also notes in his book: “One of the most amazing things about these defining principles of economic freedom is that they also constitute a set of principles for economic success. Economic theory and experience show that they lead to superior economic outcomes, including strong economic growth and rising prosperity.”

Indeed, it’s not just “right-wing nuts” who see that Obama’s desire for more collectivism has resulted in the historically weak economic recovery. Some on his side of the aisle also see it.

To that end, everyone should read author Edward Klein’s New York Times Bestseller, “The Amateur” (for excerpts see below). Klein, a former editor of the New York Times Sunday Magazine, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and former foreign editor for Newsweek — all liberal publications — reported and wrote a stunning, revealing portrait of Barack Obama that definitively verifies our fears.

Many of The Observer readers we offended last week (and probably this week, too) should know: 1) We respect your points of view; and 2) the passion we previously mentioned is rooted in the fervent belief that accompanies this page every week, that of the late Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek: “A policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy.”— Matt Walsh

Excerpts …“Obama’s supporters claim that he has been falsely charged with being a leftwing ideologue. But based on my reporting, I concluded that Obama is actually in revolt against the values of the society he was elected to lead. Which is why he has refused to embrace American exceptionalism — the idea that Americans are a special people with a special destiny — and why he has railed at the captialist system, demonized the wealthy and embraced the Occupy Wall Street movement.”

“Hillary (Clinton) rolled her eyes.
“‘I’m the highest-ranking member in Obama’s cabinet,’ she pointed out. ‘I eat breakfast with the guy every Thursday morning. What about loyalty, Bill? What about loyalty?
“‘Loyalty is a joke,’ Bill said. ‘Loyalty doesn’t exist in politics. There’s no such word in the political rulebook. I’ve had two successors since I left the White House — Bush and Obama — and I’ve heard more from Bush, asking for my advice, than I’ve heard from Obama. I have no relationship with the president — none whatsoever. Obama doesn’t know how to be president. He doesn’t know how the world works. He’s incompetent. He’s … he’s …’
“Bill’s voice was growing hoarse — he was speaking a rough whisper — but he looked as though he could go on forever bashing Obama. And then, all at once and without warning, he stopped cold.
“He bit his lower lip and scanned the faces in the room. He was plainly gratified to see that his audience was spellbound. They were waiting for the politician par excellence to deliver his final judgment on the 44th president of the United States.
“‘Barack Obama,’ said Bill Clinton, ‘is an amateur.’”